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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #12, 8/27/2006

The Trauma of the Family Court Guy

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

Behind the Family Court Guy is an unspeakable
trauma. It almost seems like a dream at this
point, and even I have difficulty believing that
it actually happened.

I may seem strong at the moment. I have many
contacts in the court system, in the press and in
child welfare. I know how to get attention for any
case that concerns me.

This wasn't the situation 2-1/2 years ago, when I
was a nobody and couldn't even get a caseworker to
return a single phone call.

I could only stand by helplessly while the child I
loved and who I had raised for most of her life was
tortured by a system that did not care about
her.

I now have a deep personal understanding of the
child welfare system and exactly how it can go
wrong, because I personally experienced the worse
of it. With only slight exaggeration,
I call it my own personal Holocaust.

In 1998, my wife and I took a newborn baby into
our home, the daughter of a drug-addicted relative
of my wife. I was her primary caregiver, and I
raised her as my own daughter. I was her only
true "Daddy," and the dream was always adoption.

We experienced the trauma of seeing our daughter
reunited with her deeply dysfunctional birth
mother not once but twice. Every time the case was
closed by the state, the mother quickly relapsed
into drug abuse. We kept in contact with the
mother, so we knew when she was doing drugs, but
it was impossible to get CPS to pay any attention.
To them, we were only jealous former foster
parents who were trying to sabotage the mother.
Finally, others reported the mother's drug use,
and the daughter and her siblings were taken
away.

Although the child remained in our custody and the
mother's rights were eventually terminated, the
case dragged on for months, then years. We wanted
desperately to adopt, but by the time the child
was nearly six, it still hadn't happened.

Our caseworker, Shari Sanchez, was indifferent at
best. She rarely visited us (2-3 times a year at
most) and was nearly impossible to contact in the
interim. (She never answered her phone directly,
and most messages left on voicemail got no reply.)
If there were ever any problems, such as medical
issues, we were completely alone and had to
resolve them on our own.

Today, I would know what to do to light a fire
under the caseworker, but back then it seemed we
had no options. The situation seemed harmless
anyway: The child was already living with us as our
daughter. We were receiving a monthly subsidy and
free medical care for her, which we didn't mind,
so whether or not the child was adopted didn't
seem important.

Then my marriage collapsed. It didn't just
fail as a single event. It collapsed in a way
that trapped me in the worst sort of prison
imaginable for 2-1/2 years. It was an utterly
devastating and life-changing experience.

My wife went crazy. "Crazy", of course, is
shorthand for a very complex phenomenon. The
technical term is Borderline Personality
Disorder, a difficult-to-describe illness that
seems to defy logic and that you have to experience to
believe. I have always been well-read in
psychology, but even I wasn't prepared for it.

9/1/06: Of course, my now ex-wife
strongly denies this claim, and is distressed to find
it here. She was never "crazy," she says. She was just
responding as anyone else would to stresses that I put
her under. Indeed, she has never been professionally
diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder,
only Depression and possibly
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

All of the following should be be regarded as my
opinion and my personal perception of events,
which could be wrong. The reader must keep in mind that my
ex-wife has a different view.

In Fall of 2003, my wife became deeply paranoid,
and began accusing me of things I didn't do:
planting cameras and listening devices in our
home, having secret affairs, stealing money from
her, trying to abduct our daughter and take her
out of the country. The charges were constantly
changing and were often inconsistent with the
charges made only the day before. I must have been
a Superman to do all the bad things she accused me
of.

The interesting thing about each thing my wife
accused me of is that it could be true, at
least if you listened only to the evidence she
presented and ignored the other charges. As might
be expected, her relatives believed everything she
told them about me, while my relatives believed
me. The trouble was, mine were in Boston and hers
were here in Las Vegas. This was the same
troubled family that produced the drug-addicted
birth mother, with extensive multi-generational substance
abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence.
No one in any branch of the family
had ever graduated from high school in the
normal course.
My own background was quite the oppositealmost
to an alien degreeand
as the stresses increased, communication between the two
worlds became
more and more tenuous.

My wife's relatives, with limited education, were unable to process
the concept of mental illness. Whatever my wife
told them about me, no matter how bizarre, they
apparently believed, without any attempt at verification.
Faced with the stress caused by my wife's
violent accusations, her family
pulled together against this perceived outside threatme.

In October 2003, my wife kicked me out of our
jointly-owned house. Although I had a legal right
to be there, it was impossible to stay for long,
since I would be continuously harassed for my
alleged crimes whenever I showed up. After I moved
out, she really got paranoid. She barricaded all
the doors and windows with furniture, and she held
our foster child inside as a virtual prisoner,
supposedly to protect her from me. It was a
bizarre and scary scene, and there was virtually
no one I could go to for help. My wife refused
all counseling or medical treatmentsince she
saw the problem as me, not herbut she didn't
meet the criteria to be involuntarily hospitalized.

The caseworker, of course, remained uncontactable,
and when I finally did get through to her, she was
indifferent and non-responsive. I eventually
requested in writing that the child be temporarily
removed from our home because of my wife's
worsening mental state. I hand-delivered the
letter to the caseworker, who showed no reaction.
When this letter got no response for several days,
and my wife's condition temporarily improved, I
sent another letter withdrawing the request. After
years of dealing with Shari Sanchez, I
knew that she was clueless about psychology and
incapable of
intelligent action and would only make matter
worse.

The situation was in a stalemate for three
monthsmid-October 2003 through mid-January
2004with my wife barricaded in the house most of
that time along with our foster child. Sleeping
in the desert, I agonized over
what to do and dreaded what would happen when the
caseworker eventually arrived.
The caseworker, who
was legally required to visit every month, didn't
contact us even once during this time, even after
my letters in November, and of course she didn't return phone
calls.

My wife's mother, who was a foster
parent of a brother of our child, believed her
daughter without question and refused to talk to me.
She conveyed news of my abusiveness to a third set of
foster parents who had another sister and who
happened to go the same church. Thus,
by the time the caseworker bothered to visit, there
were a half-dozen "witnesses" to my supposed abuse,
none of whom actually saw it.

When the caseworker finally arrived at our house
in January 2004, when I was not present,
she listened to my wife's paranoid
claims, agreed that I was abusive and took the
child away. Although I raised the child for most
of her life and was her only emotional father, I
have never been allowed to see her since then.

When the child was taken, the caseworker told my
wife to tell me that I couldn't see the child
until I contacted her. The catch was, there was
no way to contact the caseworker. I left messages
every day and wrote letters, but no communication
was ever returned.
(I believe that I also tried to contact the
supervisor, but I don't recall the exact outcome,
only that it went nowhere.)

As soon as my wife started making her paranoid
claims, no one involved in the case, including the
caseworker, my wife's relatives and the other
foster parents who I had known for years, would
talk to me in any form. If I reached anyone on
the phone, they would immediately hang up on me. They accepted
my wife's claims at face value, even the ones
about the cameras and listening devices I
supposedly planted in our house. (You would think
that someone would at least look for these
devices.) I was seen as a criminalan
abductor, an abuser, a manipulator, a burglar and
a spyby dozens of people who I had once thought
were friends. They repeated each other's rumors
about me, but all of them declined to hear my
side.

(I think part of the problem was that I was
intelligent, educated, creative, adaptable and completely
dedicated to my role as a husband and father.
In other words, I was someone beyond their
comprehension and therefore dangerous.)

My challenge was not only to contact the caseworker
but to counter all of the imaginary charges generated
by my wife and apparently taken by the state as true.
I finally hired a lawyer, Rebecca Burton, to try
to get through to the caseworker. The lawyer went
through the chain of command and eventually talked
to the caseworker on the phone. The caseworker
promised to talk with me, but never did.

The lawyer told me that because I was only a foster
parent, I had no legal rights, even to ask for
visitation. (An apparent visitation provision in the
Nevada Revised Statutes turned out to be illusory,
as it did not apply to foster parents.)
The state "owned" this child and
could do anything it wanted with her. The fact
that I had raised her for 5-1/2 years and had at
least as strong a bond with her as any biological parent
meant nothing under the law.

The child was moved from one thoughtless foster
placement to another. Everyone was very careful
to make sure that I didn't know where the child
was. I was seen as a physical threat to the child,
based only on my wife's claims about me.

In the meantime, our family finances were also
collapsing. My wife was too unstable to do significant work, and
I was the sole supporter of the family, which
included three other children from my wife's
previous marriages. I felt that I could not simply
abandon these children to my wife's mental
illness. No matter how badly my wife treated me,
I felt that I had to continue supporting my family until
I could implement some sort of transition plan.

Because of the high emotional volatility our
household, our finances had always been fragile; now
they were dire.
I ran a home-based business selling books on the
internet, but now I could not enter my own home
without being attacked. This began the most
desperate financial juggling act of my life, where
I struggled by every creative means possible to
support a family who seemed to hate me in a house
I couldn't live in. The nightmare lasted 2-1/2
years and only ended when our home was sold in
April 2006. (Now, my ex-wife has moved out of
state and appears to be doing well.)

(That is, until she found this webpage.)

Although no one would talk to me directly about my
daughter, stories filtered in to me about
how poorly she was doing in foster care. She was
rebellious and uncooperativeas she should
have been! No one seemed to have a clue about her
emotional needs. I would lie awake in the desert
worrying about her. Eventually this drew me into
the court system, at least as an observer. Even
though I had no legal standing, I tried everything
I could to get someone to pay attention to her
case.

Today, I would have known what to do, but back
then I was an indigent and helpless victim of the
system. The militant Family Court Guy who you see
before you is a reaction to that helplessness.

My daughter, who was now seen as a problem child,
was kicked around in thoughtless foster placements
for 1-1/2 years. There was a break, however, in
early 2005, when her caseworker died.

She just up and died, supposedly of a cerebral
hemorrhage. I say that it is because of all the pins I
stuck in my voodoo doll of her.

The new caseworker, Helene Pierce, was only slightly
more competent but at least returned my phone
calls occasionally.

I also met the supervisor of both Shari and Helene. She struck
me as a non-entity and a non-presence. Whatever decision
was made by her caseworkers, she was going to back it.
All of these people seemed only concerned with moving
bodies around and avoiding more work
and appeared to have no comprehension of
the emotional needs of children.

I hired another lawyer, ostensibly on behalf of my wife,
who was related by blood to the child and might have a slim chance
at having some legal standing. (My relationship with my wife was up and down during during this period. There were times of relative
stability when we were able to work together, especially to try to save our child.) The lawyer managed to get a
Children's Advocate Attorney (CAP) appointed to
the child, which sounded like a victory at first.

The CAP attorney, a full-time Clark County Legal
employee named Kevin Leik, also refused to
return my phone calls. He did talk briefly to my ex-wife,
but mostly he talked to my wife's mother and the
other foster parents who had accepted my
ex-wife's original stories as true and who had refused to talk
to me. These people provided all of the information
about the child's background and about me that Mr. Leik needed.
He refused to speak with me
until I showed up unexpectedly in court, and even then, he
never had any interest in hearing my side of past
events. He reported to the court that our divorce
was "nasty" and that was as deep as he cared to go.

Leik always seemed supremely confident of himselfpompously
sobut he
appeared to have no intuitive grasp of children.
To me, he seemed grossly unqualified for the job,
and I wondered how he was chosen.

In June 2005, my daughter was placed with what
I was told is a good home. The family wanted to
adopt her, and the adoption went through in
December 2005. This was almost exactly six months
after she was placed with the new family, the
legal minimum. (Since adoptions usually take
years, I attribute this quick work to my growing
position as an activist and the desire of the
caseworkers to dispose of the case as quickly as
possible.)

In the fall of 2005, when the child was still a
ward of the state, I made a formal request to see
her. At the time, she was 7, had not seen me in 20
months, and had been filled with who-knows-what
nonsense about me. The request was denied. Both
the caseworker and the CAP attorney determined
that the child did not want to see me, end of story.

I think most people who have talked to me, both
now and then, would regard me as intelligent,
rational and consciencious, but back then it then
it didn't matter. If no one would talk to me,
there was no way I could show my intelligence.
I ran into brick walls everywhere
I turned, and I hardly found a shred of conscience
or intelligence anywhere. I had been a dedicated
foster parent for 5-1/2 years, but I was still
expendable and worthlessno better than an
unreformed drug addict whose parental rights has been
terminated.

I sensed that the caseworkers (at least these two)
had plenty of practice
in blowing people off. They just stopped returning
phone calls and expected people to go away.

Over time, the experience went from
unremitting pain
to an almost cosmic mission. It seemed that
the worst of all possible experiences were lined up
for me, just so I would be pushed to achieve my best.
It was a transformative ordeal
that stripped away all of my investments and distractions
and eventually turned into a fantastic
opportunity to do the things I had always wanted to.

I still want to see my former foster daughter
again, without disrupting her placement. Custody
has never been an issue, only seeing my child again
and participating in her transition.
I realize that she is just one child of many
and that she hasn't seen me in 2-1/2 years,
but there is still something special and important in
our relationship.

We had a
very close bond during our years together.
Because of my wife's instabilities, I was both the
mom and the dad to her most of the time, through the most
critical parts of her development. A child can't be
asked to just discard this formative experience
with some invented stories that I was abusive. I
wasn't. What is she going to do when she finds out
the truth?

For her health as well as mine, our relationship
need to be "normalized," but I am not sure
how to go about it. Since she has been adopted,
the state no longer has any control over her. I
know nothing about the new parents except that
they are still in Nevada. The only information
they have received about me is what the
caseworkers, CAP attorney and the other foster
parents have told them, which is certainly
distorted. I have no idea what her emotional
situation is or whether I am still considered a
threat. I could probably write a letter
and ask that it be forwarded, as I have tried
once before, but I don't know what charges I am trying to
refute.

A few weeks ago, at her own initiative, a manager
at DFS retrieved the case file in my child's case.
After reviewing it, she sent me an email
expressing concern about how my case had been
handled, just based on the written record. She
apologized on behalf of DFS for the agency not
giving me due process.

Later, this official apology was withdrawn, on the
orders of the new director of the agency, Thomas
Morton. He told the the manager that she had no
authority to make such an assessment. (The
unofficial apology remains in force,
however, and I still take it to heart.)

The manager has since been fired.

Other links for the child, including photos,
can be found on the Patricia page.

I was hoping that my ex-wife wouldn't see this
page, but she did.
On 8/29/06, she responded with
three telephone messages (audio file
and transcript). An excerpt:

"If I'm the one that's crazy, Glenn, instead of you, then why did I get to see Patricia while I was in Vegas and you haven't. Fuck you."

Reader Comments

“My heart breaks for this guy, the justice sysem does not recognise the damage a dysfunctional family can do, at least give a child a good role model for a while, something to remember. Nasty people have nasty kids .”
— 12/31/08 (rating=5)

“I filed for a divorce, 67 years old. Forced to take out an order to keep her away, because of her violence. Four days later she took out a bogus order on me, claiming that I slapped her. In the family court hearing, I learned what the term, "a preponderance of evidence" means, which is what ever the gender biased court hears from the female it is automatically accepted as truth. The stigma and suffering that I have wrongly suffered is horrible.”
—Ron 3/11/09 (rating=5)